


tick, tick, tick

by orphan_account



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Weekly Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 13:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11232168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Is she in labor?”“Help?” Rufus implored.“I… Rufus, I don’t know anything about… that,” she said, gesturing to the extended stomach. “What do you expect me to do?”“They’re your.. parts,” Rufus argued, looking away when Lucy stared at him in shock. “Just… get down there and… catch?”A fic of inappropriately timed confessions





	tick, tick, tick

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the inappropriately timed confessions weekly challenge

 

“Lucy!” Rufus yelled as he ran out of the barn, his eyes wide, his arms waving for her attention.

 

Lucy began to walk towards him. Slow at first, but picking up speed as his desperation increased.

 

“Lucy, we need your help!”

 

That made her run. Hitching her dress up, she gripped it in her fists as she ran to meet him. Her boots slid in the mud but she managed to stay on her feet, pushing herself despite the ache in her lungs, because something was wrong.

 

“What is it?” she asked between breathless pants, letting her skirt go, she bend at the waist and gripped her thighs as she filled her lungs with air. She was going to have to work on her cardio.

 

“Come, quick,” he said, taking hold of her hand and pulling her with him.

 

“Rufus,” she panted. “What’s wrong?” She struggled to keep up with him. “Is it Wyatt? Is he okay?”

 

“He’s fine,” Rufus assured her, tugging her into the barn. “We need you.”

 

“Why?” And then she saw the woman on the floor, and… Oh. No. “Is she in labor?”

 

“Help?” Rufus implored.

 

“I… Rufus, I don’t know anything about… that,” she said, gesturing to the extended stomach. “What do you expect me to do?”

 

“They’re your.. parts,” Rufus argued, looking away when Lucy stared at him in shock. “Just… get down there and… catch?”

 

“Oh my God. Rufus!” Turning to look at the panting, groaning woman, she said, “She needs a doctor.”

 

“And there isn’t one, so please, help.”

 

“I don’t know what to do,” she reminded him. Sighing, she said, “Go find Wyatt? He’s good with blood… and stuff. I’ll… I don’t know. I’ll wait here and…do what I can.”

 

“Okay, good, thank you,” he said, before sprinting out of the barn.

 

Lucy sighed as she watched him go. Turning, she gave the woman the most encouraging smile she could muster. “I’m really hoping you didn’t understand a word of that,” Lucy said, the smile still plastered on her face. The woman just looked at her with scared, wide eyes, before crying out in pain. “Okay, I’m just gonna…” She knelt beside the woman, and said, “Breathe?”

 

The woman huffed, and moaned, sweat pouring down her face.

 

“I’ve heard that’s what you should focus on, even though you can’t understand me,” she said, as soothingly as she could. She demonstrated calm breathing, and the woman caught on, copying her as best she could. “Good,” Lucy said. “So just keep doing that and I suppose… push? When you feel you have to? I think that’s how it works. Honestly, I’ve never done this myself. I’m not sure I ever will. I want to, don’t get me wrong,” she rambled, “but I’m thirty-four, and all the statistics say I’m running out of time. I feel like, if it doesn’t happen this year, it won’t happen at all. I don’t even feel like there’s anyone in the running for dad. Well, maybe one person, but, God, we’re not even dating yet. And for him to be ready to be a dad?” she laughed. “That seems unlikely. Not that he doesn’t want to be a father, I mean, I think it’s something he’d want to do one day. But he had a wife, and they were happy, and he was in no hurry with her. I think he’d be an amazing dad. I think he’d be an amazing husband. I think I’m getting way ahead of myself when we haven’t even gone on a date yet. That biological clock thing? It’s true. I hear it, every day.”

 

“Lucy?” Wyatt called, entering the barn, and then stopping short at the scene before him. Lucy kneeling beside a woman clearly on the verge of giving birth, holding her hand, soothing her.

 

“Wyatt,” she said, breathing his name out in relief.

 

He quickly bridged the distance between the door and the women, but paused and said, “Okay, you’re both going to have to trust me here.”

“What?” Lucy asked, but the rest of her question died on her tongue as Wyatt knelt between the woman’s legs and—“Oh my god, you’ve done this before?” she asked, her eyes widening at that realisation.

 

“In Syria, once,” he replied. “With a doctor on a Sat phone talking me through it.”

 

“You are full of surprises,” she replied, a smile tugging at her lips.

 

“Yeah,” he said, almost laughing at that. “So, she’s ready,” he told Lucy, the look on his face pleading with her not to ask what exactly he’d just done with his hand to know that. “Keep holding her hand and try to keep her calm.”

 

“Who’s gonna keep me calm?” Lucy replied.

 

One side of his face curved up in his trademark half smirk. “I will, ma’am,” he replied, his voice soft.

 

She felt tension drain out of her, and smiled in return before turning her attention back to the puffing woman's face.

 

She kept her attention there through the birth, not daring to look after Wyatt laughed at her question about needing boiling water and replied with, "more like a bucket and mop". There were things she just didn’t need to know. She clutched the woman’s hand, let her grasp almost break her own hand, and plastered the most reassuring smile on her face that she could.

And after the last scream, and the last push, she heard it – crying. She turned, to find Wyatt wrapping a gooey, screaming bundle up in his shirt. Clad in only his undershirt, he wiped some gunk off baby’s face with the sleeve of the shirt, and then rested the bundle on the mother’s chest.

 

She wanted to scrunch her face up at it all, at the bloody, strange-colored bundle, at the grey cord still connecting baby to momma, but all she could think was, “I want one.” Unfortunately, too late, she realised the thought had escaped.

 

Wyatt turned to her with a surprised expression playing on his face. “Good thing you weren’t down this end or you’d be thinking the opposite right now.”

 

She sighed. “Maybe I should have been. It’s not like it’s ever going to happen.” Pushing herself to her feet, Lucy walked away, passing Rufus as he came in with a blanket, a bucket of water, and a knife, not stopping when Wyatt called out her name, just striding out of the barn to get away from the scene of a mother holding her baby.

 

He found her, ten minutes later, his hands clean of blood and god knows what else. He touched a hand to her shoulder, and she turned to him, her eyes red.

 

“I’m okay,” she told him. “I’m just a little sad.”

 

He sat down on a hay bale, tugging her down beside him, and slung a comforting arm around her shoulders. “You have regrets?”

 

Dipping her chin, she let out a soft sigh. “I always thought there’d be time, and so I focused on my career first. And now, here I am, nearing that age where it’s no longer possible, and I know there are more options in our time, but I look at my life, as this life us three are living, and I wonder how I could possibly even consider having a child. I mean, pregnancy and time travel? How would that even work. I wouldn’t be able to travel with you guys anymore. And if I did it on my own, could I work at all?”

 

“You think you’d have to do it on your own?” he asked. “Lucy, there’s no way you won’t find someone to do that with you. That’s not possible.”

 

“Well, so far it has been.”

 

“Because you weren’t thinking about it,” he reminded her. “And as for work, you know, Christopher wouldn’t let you leave that easily. She’d keep you on as a consultant, I’m sure. And me and Rufus would pretend to like our temporary historian, but really we’d be missing you the whole time.”

 

Lucy smiled against him. “Maybe it’s not hopeless?”

 

“It’s not hopeless at all,” he promised her. “And, listen, I’ve just seen something that, once again, is going to stay with me for quite some time. But,” he said, his voice lowering so that only she could hear him, “if you really needed help, with _y_ _’_ _know_ , I could help.” He shrugged.

 

“Are you talking about the birth?”  She blinked and looked up at him.

 

“Well, yeah, I could help with that too but no, I meant… the whole getting pregnant thing.”

 

“I’m really not following.”

 

“I think you are.” He gave her a look as he eased his arm back from where it had been resting over her shoulders, the contact suddenly feeling awkward.

 

“No, you really need to spell this out for me.”

 

“If you needed someone to…” He scratched at the back of his head. “Uh…. Donate. Services.”

 

“Oh my God, Wyatt,” she said, and she’d be laughing if she wasn’t so shell-shocked. “You just pulled a baby out of a woman and you can’t say the word sperm?”

 

He sighed. “Pretty much, yeah.”

 

“But if I handed you a cup you’d fill it?” She grinned at him as he squirmed. "With sperm."

 

“Or we could do it a different way, one more traditional,” he mumbled.

 

Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

 

She watched as he sucked in a breath, clearly using the moment to summon courage, before he replied, “It wouldn’t necessarily have to be so clinical. Look, I trust you, you trust me.”

 

“Wow,” she breathed out. “This is not the conversation I expected to be having today.”

 

“Just putting it out there.”

 

“Yeah, no I appreciate that but… trust? It would come down to trust?”

 

“And friendship.”

 

The man was infuriating. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t get pregnant, not while Emma still has the mothership. I can’t travel through time pregnant. Look at what Jiya’s going through. What if… I don’t even want to think about how it could affect a fetus.”

 

“The offer will always be there,” he said, his voice stronger now.

 

“The offer for sperm,” she said, only saying it for his discomfort. But he didn’t seem so bothered now.

 

“Yes,” he said, nodding his head. “The offer for sperm will always be there.”

 

“Always?” she asked.

 

“Always.”

 

She threw her arms around him then. “Don’t think for a second I’m not mortified by this conversation,” she murmured into his shoulder. “But it’s also the sweetest thing any one has ever offered me, so I’m pretending my face isn’t beet-red right now.”

 

“Me too,” he replied.

 

Pulling back, she turned her head and brushed her lips across his cheek. “Thank you.”

 

He did blush this time. “You’re welcome, ma’am.”

 

“But you know,” she said, a cheeky gleam in her eyes. “If we did this the traditional way, I mean, I’d kind of expect dinner first.”

 

“Oh dinner?” he asked, a smirk tugging at his lips. “Really?”

 

“Mmhmmm,” she replied. “Maybe a couple of dinners, actually. And a movie, or two.”

 

“And then we’d have to practice, you know, a lot leading up to the big night.”

 

“Night?” she mused. “Or morning. Or afternoon. You know, I’m traditional to a point.”

 

“And this kind of thing can take years, so… we should start with the dinners soon.”

 

“Tonight?” she asked, sucking her lower lip between her teeth.

 

“Tonight sounds good.” He fingers curled at her hips, and he slid her along the hay bale, catching her lips with his.

 

“We’re in Poland, in 1939, on the eve of the second world war – and you two are making out like teenagers,” Rufus groused as he strode past them. “Really?”

 

“What?” Wyatt asked, after having reluctantly broken the kiss. He stood, pulling Lucy up with him, and they followed Rufus.

 

“You don’t think that’s inappropriate?” Rufus asked.

 

“I think we left propriety back in 2017,” Lucy admitted, catching Wyatt’s eye and smiling.

 

“Well let’s get back there before whatever this is,” Rufus said, turning and gesturing between the two of them, “gets any worse.”

 

Wrapping an arm around Lucy’s waist, Wyatt leaned into her and whispered, “Oh I think it’s only going to get better.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written fast, not edited, apologies for that.


End file.
